Overview

Francisco D’Sai is a firstborn son of a firstborn son—all the way back to the beginning of a long line of proud Konkans. Known as the ÒJews of India,Ó the Konkans kneeled before the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s sword and before Saint Francis Xavier’s cross, abandoned their Hindu traditions, and became Catholics. In 1973 Francisco’s Konkan father, Lawrence, and American mother, Denise, move to Chicago, where Francisco is born. His father, who does his best to assimilate into American culture, drinks a lot ...

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Overview

Francisco D’Sai is a firstborn son of a firstborn son—all the way back to the beginning of a long line of proud Konkans. Known as the ÒJews of India,Ó the Konkans kneeled before the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s sword and before Saint Francis Xavier’s cross, abandoned their Hindu traditions, and became Catholics. In 1973 Francisco’s Konkan father, Lawrence, and American mother, Denise, move to Chicago, where Francisco is born. His father, who does his best to assimilate into American culture, drinks a lot and speaks little. But his mother, who served in the Peace Corps in India, and his uncle Sam (aka Samuel Erasmus D’Sai) are passionate raconteurs who do their best to preserve the family’s Konkan heritage. Friends, allies, and eventually lovers, Sam and Denise feed Francisco’s imagination with proud visions of India and Konkan history.

Filled with romance, comedy, and masterful storytelling, The Konkans leaves us surprised by what secrets history may hold for us if only we wonder enough to look.

Editorial Reviews

Entertainment Weekly

"The author, a savvy storyteller with a clear, soulful voice, just knows good source material when he lives it. What he has created—with an appealingly unfashionable simplicity—is a rich, warm, personal yarn... there are so many terrific vignettes to squeeze in... [A]n affectionate exploration of personal identity in order to make sense of conflicting parts—and thus become whole in a multicultural world. In this Age of Obama, the search couldn't be more timely, nor the result more gratifying. A-"

The Boston Globe

"D'Souza's compelling tale of one extended family's trials and triumphs in a foreign land is an astute glimpse of the challenges, dangers, and rewards of assimilation...He recounts his family's history with a soft heart and a wry, detached tone, unquestioning and accepting of their flaws as well as their accomplishments."

Booklist

"With both humor and pathos, D'Souza has written an engrossing story of characters caught in a clash of past and present from which they can't escape."

St. Petersburg Times

"D'Souza always maintains focus on his vividly imagined characters and their stories, funny and romantic and heartbreaking as stories told softly to a beloved's ear..."

Rabindranath Maharaj

Characters who find themselves by exploring their ancestry are hardly new…but D'Souza injects this common story line with a gentle humor that displaces romanticization or cliche…This is an ambitious second novel. It acknowledges the gaps in our histories, the personal and cultural falsehoods with which we have grown comfortable. As with his previous book, some readers might wonder at the similarities between writer and narrator. But that's beside the point. D'Souza treats his subjects with compassion even as he recognizes their weaknesses. There is a kind of freshness and bubbling wonder in this book, the sense of a writer genuinely searching for answers…
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

D'Souza follows up the promise of Whiteman(2006) with this moving portrait of a Indian-American family. Narrator Francisco D'Sai descends partially from a small group of Konkans, former Hindus converted to Catholicism by the Portuguese in the 16th century. His American mother, Denise, met and married his father, Lawrence, while working as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s. The couple moves to Chicago, where Francisco is born and where Lawrence is obsessed with assimilation and achieving the American dream. In contrast, Francisco's uncle Sam, whom Denise insists they sponsor to America, is a much more soulful man who retains his Indian identity. Sam tells fabulous tales of Konkan culture and is adored by both Francisco and Denise, whose infatuation with India persists even as her love for Lawrence dwindles. The author moves deftly from character to character, detailing Denise's Peace Corps days and subsequent suburban boredom, Lawrence's grim struggle up the corporate ladder (his mission to earn acceptance by a country club is particularly sad) and Sam's search for purpose amid his troubling love for Denise. D'Souza puts a fresh spin on the theme of cultural alienation, and he achieves something even more universal as he shows how the characters are alone together in their family. (Feb.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Library Journal

The narrator of D'Souza's (Whiteman) second novel is Francisco D'Sai, the firstborn son of a firstborn son from a proud family of Konkans, Catholic Indians living among a Hindu majority in Chikmagalur, India. Francisco's American mother, Denise, fell in love with India when she was on assignment with the Peace Corps, while his Konkan father, Lawrence, fell in love with Denise. The two developed a relationship, but while Denise longed to stay in India, Lawrence's family had been plotting his escape. By 1973, Denise and Lawrence had moved to Chicago, where Francisco was born. It is in Chicago that Lawrence, who yearns to be accepted as a member of upper-middle-class white suburban society, begins drinking heavily, and Denise finds that she has much in common with one of Lawrence's brothers, Sam, including their interest in maintaining Indian and particularly Konkan culture in America. This vibrantly written novel, with colorful descriptions of India and the experiences of new immigrants in America, alternates between the hilarious and the heartbreaking; highly recommended for public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ10/1/07.]
—Sarah Conrad Weisman

Kirkus Reviews

D'Souza's second work of fiction (Whiteman, 2006), less a novel than a collection of linked stories, is at its heart about two Konkan brothers and a white American woman. The American is Denise Klein, a poor runaway from Detroit who still achieves a college education. In 1966 she joins the Peace Corps for three extraordinary years in India among the Konkans (an ethnic minority) on the West Coast. These people share cultural traits with the Hindus yet have their own language, practice Catholicism (a legacy of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama) and have a taste for pork. The tall, glamorous white woman is noticed by Santan D'Sai, an upper-class Konkan and former police commissioner. He orders his firstborn Lawrence home from Bombay to woo Denise, who "wanted to marry India." So she accepts the eligible bachelor, unaware this is a form of arranged marriage, just as Lawrence is unaware he is marrying below his caste. The couple leaves for Chicago, where Denise gives birth to Francisco. The little boy is the narrator; it sounds awkward, but it works. The stories are not in chronological order and are interwoven with commentaries on Konkan culture. Despite a spellbinding fairytale version of da Gama's voyage to India, there may be too much didacticism here for some readers, especially as there's such rich material in the relationships between Denise, Lawrence and Sam, a younger brother who joins them in Chicago. Denise favors the fun-loving Sam over her stern husband and they have an affair. There is something tragic about both brothers' American lives: Lawrence thinks he's white until racist assaults on his suburban home remind him otherwise, while Sam lacks the courage to defy his family andmarry the black American he's been dating. Every page yields its pleasures-D'Souza is a natural. The only disappointment is that he has not orchestrated the lives of his three protagonists into a more focused narrative. Agent: Liz Darhansoff/Darhansoff, Verrill, Feldman Literary Agents

From the Publisher

PRAISE FOR THE KONKANS

“[A] savvy storyteller with a clear, soulful voice . . . [D’Souza] has created . . . an affectionate exploration of personal identity in order to make sense of conflicting parts—and thus become whole in a multicultural world.”—Entertainment Weekly

“D’Souza’s compelling tale of one extended family’s trials and triumphs in a foreign land is an astute glimpse of the challenges, dangers, and rewards of assimilation.”—Boston Globe

The Barnes & Noble Review

Surely, this is the age of fact disguised as fiction in Indian writing in English. When Arundhati Roy dedicated The God of Small Things to her mother, "who taught me to say 'excuse me' before interrupting her in public" -- a line repeated in the novel -- Roy let the reader know that her protagonists Rahel and Estha had more to share with herself and her brother than fiction often allows. In Tony D'Souza's The Konkans, the origins of narrator Francisco D'Sai pointedly mirror the mixed heritage of the author, the Chicago-raised son of an Indian father and American mother. Francisco's tale builds on the dual perspectives of his own father, Lawrence -- propelled by family industry and ambition first to a white-collar job in Bombay and eventually out of "the noise, the crowd, the filth" of India -- and his American mother, Denise, enraptured by her own view of India as exotic spectacle and spiritual destination. Their uneasy compromise of visions takes them back to an America Denise cannot see as home, and brings to join them Lawrence's two brothers, Sam and Lesley, with results that put Lawrence and Denise's bond into question. The resulting family saga plays out in a sprawling fashion, suggestive of the large history to be discovered within a small community. The Konkans of the title are a close-knit Catholic community in India, who, as a character in the book recounts, "had been waiting" for the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama "since the beginning of time" -- a mythic perspective containing a typical mixture of truth and semi-truth. While the Konkans indeed converted to Christianity, the process was brutal, and involved outlawing Hindu sacred texts, music, clothing, and foods. In The Konkans, D'Souza enmeshes the complexities of the historical with the urgency of the personal, to fashion a courageous story of identity and the timelessness of love. --Vikram Johri

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

Tony D’Souza is the author of three novels, including the award-winning Whiteman. He has contributed to The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, Outside, Salon, Granta, McSweeney’s, O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Fantasy, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Sue Kaufman Prize, Florida Gold and Silver Medals for fiction, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and the NEA, Tony was nominated for a National Magazine Award for coverage of Nicaragua’s Eric Volz murder trial and spent three years in Africa with the Peace Corps.

Read an Excerpt

The Konkans

Harcourt, Inc.

Chapter One

The Pig

A long time ago, my uncles bought a pig. I was a few months old at the time. I'd like to say that my uncles bought the pig to herald my birth, but no, it was instead to celebrate the feast of St. Francis Xavier, my namesake and our family's patron saint, the man who had brought Catholicism and the roots of Konkani, my uncles' language, to the western coast of India, where they and my father were from, in the early sixteenth century. My uncles had been in America less than a year, my father, four years. My mother was born in Detroit, had spent three years in the Peace Corps in India, where she'd met and married my father.

My uncles were rowdy, debonair young men in the Indian way, not like my father at all. My father was a replica of my grandfather, a police commissioner in Karnataka state, a man as hard as granite with the old Portuguese work ethic as sure in him as his tightly clipped mustache. There was a photo album in our house devoted just to pictures of him, and whether he was in his captain's uniform with the sash and epaulets and his Lee-Enfield rifle on his shoulder, or whether he was in his rattan chair on the porch of his house in India in a white T-shirt and lungi wrap with one hand raised on his cane, he never cracked a smile. That's what my father was like, too.

But my uncles did not have the burdens on them that my father did as a firstborn Konkan son, and they liked to drink and dance and joke and chase women. My mother says that the transition to American life was hard for all of them, but the pictures of my uncles from that time don't support that idea. In picture after picture, my uncles flank my father, smiling like boys up to something, while my father does his best impression of a senator. For two years, my uncles lived in the basement of our house on Nelson Street, and then my father got fed up with them and sold the house, and we left Chicago for the suburbs. My uncles were then on their own.

The one uncle was named Samuel Erasmus, but my father renamed him Sam when he arrived, and the other was named Lesley Wenceslaus, but my father renamed him Les. This was to help them fit in to America. When they got off the plane at O'Hare in 1973, they were both sporting Fu Manchu mustaches that swept the edges of their chins, because an American kung fu film had been all the rage in India the year before, and knowing nothing of America other than that, they'd grown those mustaches to get ready for their immigration to it. No one else wore mustaches like that in their town in southern India, so everyone had known what they were up to and where they were going. According to my uncles, they became very popular with girls.

The first thing my father said to his brothers at the airport, even before "Welcome," which he never said, was, "Those mustaches have to go." He stopped at a Walgreens on the way home to buy disposable razors, and before they could even sit down to their first American meal, meat loaf with ketchup and mashed potatoes, which my mother, newly pregnant with me, had prepared for them, they were in the basement bathroom shaving while my father looked on with his arms crossed.

"You don't know anything here. Do you understand me? You do not know one single thing."

"Fine, Babu, you are right," they said together. "Tell us every small thing and we will do it."

"Be quiet and don't make a lot of noise."

"Yes, Babu, that is what we will do."

The fact was, my father did not want his brothers in America, did not want anything from India following him into his new life here. My father was something of a prig, and though it wasn't his fault, there it was. My grandfather had spent the family's money on educating him, and while the rest of the children ran about the streets of Chikmagalur in their bare feet just like the Hindu and Muslim kids did, my father went to a Catholic college in Mangalore on the coast, and then worked for a number of years as a clerk at Standard Chartered Bank in Bombay. He always had the finest shirts and trousers, and had been a member of the British-organized Chikmagalur Boys' Cricket Club in his youth. My father wanted to be a British gentleman above and beyond all else, and when the opportunity of my mother came along, he took that as a ticket to the United States, the ersatz Britain.

But my uncles were the dust and chaos of real India, and when they wrote on my grandfather's urging that they'd like to come, my mother snatched the letter from the trash where my father had tossed it, and she filled out the paperwork to sponsor them. This threw my father into a rage. His specialty those days was swearing through clenched teeth and thumping his chest.

"Don't you respect me, Denise? Didn't you take a vow to support me in all I do?"

"I don't remember saying that I would be your slave, Lawrence," my mother told him, "and besides that, I want mine to be a life of family. When I married you, I married your family. If they want to come over, then it's our duty to help them. Why should you be the only one in the world who gets to live here?"

My mother was headstrong and brave, with slender arms and long blond hair that she wore in a ponytail. She'd gone to India for a lot of reasons, primarily to get away from her family, and secondly because she had believed in John F. Kennedy's vision of the world. While there, she had first fallen in love with the country and its people, and later, just before she was scheduled to leave, with my father. My father could read and write and had a salable education. My mother would probably have been happier married to an oxcart driver or laundry washer, but her poor roots had made her practical about the realities of the world, and in marrying my father, she'd brought home with her the one living-and-breathing souvenir of that place who could also get a job in America. Sponsoring over my uncles was done to spite him, a return to what she really loved. Many were the nights that my mother drank and sang and talked Konkani with them while my father glowered in his study, pretending to pore over paperwork for his position as a corporate insurance manager with the multinational Hinton & Thompson, but really grinding his teeth at all that noise, which reminded him in an uncomfortable way of where he was from and who he in fact was.

My mother prepared the basement of the house on Nelson Street for my uncles' arrival with happiness and cheer. The house had been cut up into rentals before my parents had bought it, and there wasn't much for her to do, really, but wipe a wet sponge along the sink and toilet, and hang yellow curtains over the half windows to make that basement seem like a home. There was a cement-stairway entrance to the basement apartment from the garden, where my mother grew tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers in trellised rows, as well as a stairway inside that led to my parents' kitchen. Just before they came, my father had a workman install a lock on the door at the top of the stairway to the kitchen, and all during their first weeks in the basement, my uncles had to go out through the garden and up onto the porch to ring the bell like visitors if they wanted to see my parents. Then one afternoon my mother opened the front door and saw my uncles shivering in their undershirts in the spring rain, and she made my father give her the key and unlocked the door in the kitchen for good. Whether it was a wise decision or not, from then on the door was open, and my uncles came and went through the house as they pleased.

As men in India, my uncles weren't used to cooking for themselves, had never really done it, but in their reluctance to let go of their birthplace in this new nation, they began to cook Indian food for themselves in their basement kitchenette. This involved sautéing onions and garlic in oil and browning curry powder and meat in frying pans. The odors soon pervaded the whole house through the opened door and drove my father crazy. The other thing my uncles did down there that pissed my father off was they played Indian music on the turntable my mother had bought for them, and sang and danced and drank to it in their underwear night after night. The noise filled the house, and as they'd lie in bed together with me gestating in my mother's womb, my father would clench his teeth in the dark and say, "You see, Denise? What did I tell you? Why did we come here if everything will be as it was before? My clothes stink of it, I can feel them looking at me at the office. Why did I come here if everything I hated about it is dancing in my basement?"

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